US Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL) has introduced the Reform Immigration Through Biometrics Act, legislation that would require the collection of fingerprints, facial images, and iris scans from all travelers at every US port of entry and exit.
The bill addresses what Donalds describes as a persistent blind spot in US immigration enforcement: visa overstay tracking. He said the border “has been secured, but the work is far from over,” calling visa overstays and fraudulent documentation “a large piece of the overall illegal immigration puzzle that needs to be addressed.” The legislation would mandate full nationwide biometric coverage at all land, sea, and air ports, closing gaps in an entry-exit system that has existed in partial form since the 9/11 Commission recommended it in 2004 but was never fully deployed.
The bill would also require the Department of Homeland Security to report regularly to Congress on system coverage gaps, data flow performance, and implementation bottlenecks, creating a public accountability mechanism for an infrastructure deployment that has historically been opaque. The 2026 bill is a reintroduction of legislation Donalds first filed in the previous Congress. Donalds’ 2023 version of the Reform Immigration Through Biometrics Act, H.R. 6138, likewise called for fingerprint, facial, and iris data collection at US ports but did not advance out of committee.
The bill codifies into statute what DHS’s revived biometric border crossing rule began as a regulatory initiative in mid-2025, expanding facial recognition to all ports of entry and exit, and provides a statutory backstop that would make the requirement harder to reverse under future administrations. The DHS final rule on biometric entry-exit data collection, published in the Federal Register on October 27, 2025 and effective December 26, 2025, provides the direct regulatory context for the legislation. The infrastructure funding is already in place: Congress’s $21 billion biometric border funding package in H.R. 1 allocated resources for AI-powered surveillance and facial recognition at ports of entry. Donalds’ bill would create the statutory mandate to ensure that funding is deployed universally rather than selectively.
The triple-modal requirement, covering fingerprint, facial recognition, and iris scanning, extends the current DHS biometric exit program, which primarily uses facial recognition at air exits, and represents a significant procurement signal for biometric system vendors.
Sources: Rep. Donalds Press Release, Fox News, CBP
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
